Friday, August 13, 2010

A journey of a 1000 books begins with a single shelf...sort of.

It has been unusually hot and humid here for the past few weeks with a couple breaks in the weather recently.  The small air conditioner in my shop does an admirable job of keeping things bearable, but only if I give it a 2 hour head start to get things under control.  This means really no work on the really hot days after I get home from my day job.

I have been working, slowly, on a new set of built in bookshelves in our home office.  I had some nice simple plans in one of the many books I have collected over the years.

The plan has a 2 sets of shelves on the left side of the door and one set on the right (the door not being in the middle of the wall).  Construction starts with a 2x4 frame for each side.













































I screwed the top and bottom plates directly into the ceiling joists and sub-floor accordingly.  The vertical pieces were secured using 2 1/2" pocket screws.  I used my Kreg Mini to make all the holes and cut a spacer to help make sure they were in the proper position.
















Next 1/2" plywood was installed on the 2 exposed ends (near the door) and to make the bottom shelf and the top "cap" of each unit. Also we painted the wall behind the shelves a deep chocolate brown.













































Next, 1/2" plywood was run up the insides of the units at set lengths and 3/4" plywood was installed horizontally across to make the shelves.













































Finally (so far) some 3/4" poplar was cut and installed to begin the face frame.














































Hopefully on Sunday I will be able to cut and install the rest of the face frame across all the shelves, then the whole this is going to be painted white.

Sorry the photo's aren't so great, but the room is not big enough to get far enough away from the shelves to get the whole thing in frame....

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